The current practice for a router running Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) in downstream unsolicited mode with liberal label retention is to send all of its LDP label mappings to every LDP peer. While this avoids blackholing of traffic during failure events, it also distributes label mappings for routes that are not typically reachable via the advertising router, that is, the advertising router is not along the best path for the route and hence is not used for actual traffic forwarding. In certain large Service Provider networks, the above mentioned behavior presents a scaling challenge as the number of label mappings may become significantly large. Although the number of label mappings does not in and of itself present any issue, it does increase the processing load and memory used to store all of the information.